


Wear That Uniform Well

by Vongchild



Category: Pacific Rim
Genre: Alaska, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Cunnilingus, K-Day, M/M, PPDC, Present Tense, San Francisco, Smut, Trans Tendo Choi, ftm character, what more do you want from me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:11:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2847266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vongchild/pseuds/Vongchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tendo Choi had a plan for how his life was going to be and it did not involve the PPDC, but shit happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wear That Uniform Well

**Author's Note:**

> A little over a year ago, I posted a fic called [Bottle Rocket Principle](http://archiveofourown.org/works/980882) that went on to become a lot of people’s preferred headcanon regarding Tendo Choi’s early life. There is a lot about that fic that I am proud of, but there are also some things that, almost year and a half later, I would have handled differently. I won’t change the original fic, it is what it is and a lot of people are incredibly attached to it and I’m incredibly proud to have it be acknowledged as my major contribution to the fandom.
> 
> Bottle Rocket Principle is, at its core, a story about Tendo Choi being transgender, and it stops just as the science fiction elements of Pacific Rim really kick into gear - but Tendo’s story doesn’t end there, and I really wanted to write a story about Tendo that a) addressed the parts of BRP that I was no longer happy with and b) continued Tendo’s journey after K-Day. 
> 
> This is a story in which Tendo Choi is transgender, but it’s not in the same continuity as Bottle Rocket Principle. I know that some people will prefer that fic’s version of events, and if that’s your preferred origin for him then by all means, please continue to use it! I’m honored to have influenced people in such a way - but this is where I’ve taken the idea since then, and I hope that you all enjoy it.

1.

His favorite uncle is a marine.

Was a marine.

Is a marine, in the way that some soldiers never leave the battlefield. Anyway, that’s where it starts - Tio Julio comes over and shows off that scar where he totally got shot in the Gulf War and lays out his dress uniform on the bed in the guest bedroom so he can wear it for the Veterans’ Day Parade in the morning.

Tendo (only he’s not called Tendo yet, that part comes later, be patient), watches his uncle polish his dress shoes, kicks his tiny feet against the side of the window seat and says, “Hey, Tio Julio, I’m gonna be a marine someday, too!”

His uncle laughs and tells his sister, Tendo’s mother, “This one’s gonna give you trouble.”

2.

Tendo goes to parochial school, because his mother is nothing if not a good Catholic, and his father is nothing if not uninvolved in the act of child-rearing. There is a uniform there - starchy white polos and plaid pinafore dresses and a green sweater for San Francisco’s colder mornings that is some kind of synthetic fiber that itches like stepping on an anthill.

He envies the boys in their khaki shorts.

At the time, he thinks it is just permission to play on the monkey bars that he’s longing for.

3.

His mother teaches saints and scriptures and sins. His father teaches Cantonese and Confucian koans and a vague form of atheism that robs Tendo of his belief in Santa Claus long before it should be gone.

If he grows up confused, it isn’t without good reason.

4.

Everyone seems to think he’ll grow out of the marine thing. The Towers have fallen recently enough that it’s hip to be patriotic but long enough ago that everyone’s started to become cynical about the whole endeavor. Tendo’s declarations about his future receive condescending _that’s nice, dears_ at best.

It’s not, says one of his mother’s friends, in the politest of tones, what _girls_ are supposed to want, and Tendo thinks, for a split second, _no, stop calling me that_.

(Here is the crux of the issue, such a simple fact and yet _everything_ to some people, and Tendo is ten and sheltered and sweet-faced and doesn’t know enough about identity politics to defend himself or explain himself, and this becomes one of a series of incongruous experiences all adding up to a growing sense of wrongness and an epiphany that does not so much resemble Joan of Arc hearing voices as it does the agonizingly slow process of growth - imperceptible, gradual, _undeniable_.)

(You are taller at eleven than you are at ten. Tendo Choi is a boy.)

(But he does not say so just yet.)

5.

He does JROTC in high school, and prepares his uniform for every inspection day with reverent hands. It is the only kind of praying that Tendo sees a point to, a carefully constructed wish: _please please please._ There may even be a recommendation to the Naval academy with his name on it-

But it is 2008, and Tendo has kissed boys and he has kissed girls and he likes both and--

It is 2008, and no matter how smooth he irons his uniform, when he puts it on, it becomes too lumpy. His body is made up of too many shapes, and all the wrong ones-

It is 2008, and Tendo has lived in San Francisco for nearly all his life, so he’s not unfamiliar with any of the concepts swirling half-formed in his head. He does his research on a public library computer, standing over the desk with his biggest jacket tossed over his shoulders as if to say _don’t you dare bother me_.

He quits JROTC at the end of the semester, claiming the need to focus on his schoolwork. The dream has died - Tendo still wants the Marines, but the Marines have made their stance clear: they don’t want him.

Tio Julio comes over for Christmas dinner, and while they set out the good china, he asks what happened - and Tendo tells him _everything_.

“Oh, kiddo,” says his uncle. “That’s rough.”

“Do you still love me?” Tendo asks quietly, feeling about four years old.

His uncle shrugs. “Sure. Ain’t nothing you ever asked for."

6.

The ferry thing starts as a summer job. Tendo’s next door neighbor has worked for the company for as long as Tendo can remember, and he gets Tendo a position taking tickets and seating customers right out of high school. There’s a uniform there, navy slacks and a crisp, blue shirt with Naval detailing, and they have ranks-

It’s in no way a fair trade for what Tendo has given up, but living authentically is its own reward.

7.

He is three weeks from the start of his senior year of college when Trespasser hits San Francisco.

8.

He doesn’t like to talk about the year and a half after that.

9.

Tendo’s not even sure the PPDC will want him.

He’s twenty credits short of a degree in oceanography with a minor in computer engineering from San Francisco State, a school that doesn’t even exist anymore. He’s got a criminal record, because when you’re five feet, eight inches of sorrow, rage, and intramuscular testosterone injections bouncing around a displaced persons camp, people take it as an invitation to fuck with you.

Beggars can’t be choosers, Mr. Choi, says the girl who runs his admission paperwork to Jaeger Academy, which leaves a sour taste in his mouth. It makes him sound like the dregs of society, like how far he’s fallen and not who he _is._

 _I was going to go to Naval academy_ , Tendo thinks, as he waits for his flight to Alaska. _I was going to be a marine_. And then, maybe he wasn’t, but - _I was going to be a ferry captain. I was going to become harbormaster._ But now-

 _Endure this_ , thinks Tendo.

10.

When he closes his eyes, sometimes he still sees the mushroom cloud rising over the Golden Gate Bridge.

11.

There’s a uniform at Jaeger academy - boiler suits, not like anything Tendo’s ever worn for a job before but he wears his with pride. He has a tiny little bunkroom to call his own, although he doesn’t have many things to put in it, and three square meals a day, and it beats the displaced persons camp.

The door locks here. Tendo breathes easy.

12.

He meets Raleigh and Yancy Becket in Intro to Jaegertech, and they invite Tendo to join their study group. Later, he realizes that it’s because they’ve got one high school diploma between the two of them and figured that he could tutor them in some of the higher-level math. They’re local, they explain over calculus problems. Mother’s dead, father’s run out on them, kid sister’s gone off somewhere, too - maybe the East Coast, with their dad.

Yancy Becket is twenty. Raleigh is still a few months shy of eighteen.

They’ve heard Tendo was in San Francisco on K-Day. They say they watched it on the news. They want to know what it was like.

Tendo feels a stone form in his gut. “Hell on earth,” he says. “I never want to be that close to a kaiju ever again.”

It’s the last time they bring it up.

The Becket boys are ranger candidates. Tendo’s on the LOCCENT track. He runs the sims with them, playing operator to their imaginary jaeger, and he’s not inside their heads, but he can see their synapses all firing in unison across his display and it’s _poetry_.

13.

Raleigh and Yancy get their Jaeger, and they name it _Danger_ , and they paint a vintage pin-up girl on it because- because _of course_ they do. Tendo goes down to the clean room to watch them get fitted for their drivesuits. The crisp white body armor is as much meant to look cool as it’s meant to be functional.

 _Morale and propaganda are nearly as important as defeating Kaiju if we’re going to win this war_ , he remembers from training.

“How do I look?” Yancy asks.

“Like an imperial stormtrooper,” says Tendo. Yancy laughs.

“My aim’s better,” he says.

There’s a parcel on Tendo’s bedspread when he returns to his bunk; crisp white paper, stamped with the PPDC typeface, tied with string and wrapped around something soft. He unwraps it carefully, and he finds a gray button-up, black slacks and a black tie, and a little pouch of pins and instructions on how to wear them.

Tendo changes. He surveys himself in the mirror. He likes what he sees, which is a rare enough occurrence for it to be notable.  

There is a knock. He opens the door.

“Well,” says Yancy, “Don’t you look sharp.”

“Thank you,” says Tendo. Yancy’s changed back into his academy boiler suit. It’s unzipped to somewhere a bit south of his navel.

“Are you going to invite me in?” asks Yancy, after a moment. He has one of his hands behind his back, Tendo notices, and wonders what he’s hiding

“Why would I invite you in?” he asks guardedly, and Yancy holds up a nearly-full bottle of Maker’s Mark.

“Raleigh said he’d rather not,” he shrugs, “But my birthday’s soon enough that I won’t get in trouble for it. I don’t like drinking alone - it’s how you get called an alcoholic and sent off to a substance abuse course.”

His zipper is sending a message, a demonstration of muscle tone and golden hair that draws the eye downwards, and it is significantly more involved than _drinking buddy_. “Right,” says Tendo slowly. He’ll deal with that when they get to it. _If_ they get to it.

He opens the door and steps out of the way. Yancy breezes past, kicks off his boots, and sprawls across the bed. He takes a swig from the bottle, then holds it out to Tendo. “To _Danger_ ,” says Yancy.

“To _Danger_ ,” says Tendo, and drinks. He shudders. He is not much of a drinker. “You know, this stuff is ninety proof.”

Yancy takes the bottle back. “Well,” he says, “That’s the point. If I’m going to pay the markup on booze, it’s not gonna be on some shitty-ass Bud Lite. Raleigh spends all his commissary points on _Florida Orange Juic_ e _._ ” He says this like he thinks it’s a stupid thing to spend commissary points on.

“Fresh-squeezed, straight from trees, it’s really, really great,” says Tendo. Yancy eyes him suspiciously.

“You,” he says, “Are a huge fucking nerd.”

“Guilty as charged,” says Tendo. Yancy takes another swig.

“But,” he says, swallowing, “You are a huge fucking nerd who just got a promotion, so celebrations are in order. What’s the new title?”

“LOCCENT officer, first class,” says Tendo, taking the bottle.

“That pay well?” asks Yancy.

“Well, I was homeless before,” answers Tendo, which effectively kills that train of discussion. He drinks and passes the bottle back to Yancy. Yancy drinks. Tendo feels pleasantly warm.

“You know,” says Yancy, “I thought you were younger when I first met you. Like you struck me as a guy who’d done the college thing, but I figured you were my age.”

Tendo shrugs. “I get that a lot,” he says.

“Twenty-four is old as balls,” says Yancy.

“Wow,” says Tendo. “Tell me how you really feel.” He’s not a moron. He can see that Yancy’s trying to screw his courage up to something and he’s got a short-list of guesses. Yancy Becket’s got a reputation as a playboy, and the only thing Tendo’s got to wonder about is how he didn’t see this coming before.

“Well,” says Yancy. He sits up, a movement that seems to start from his pelvis and ripple up his body. “You’re old as balls but you wear it well.” Tendo thinks about how easy his life would be if he could just kiss Yancy _now_ and get to the point and skip all this awkward stuff, but he-

Actually, thinks Tendo. Why _isn’t_ he allowed to do that?

He is so totally allowed to do that, Tendo decides, and he closes the space between them with two quick steps. “Stop fidgeting for a second, will ya, Becket?” he asks. He straddles Yancy’s legs, wrests the bottle from his hand and, setting it aside, kisses him for long enough that it’s almost like drowning. The taste of bourbon is thick in his mouth as he finally breaks away.

Yancy looks at him, eyes half-lidded, and says, “I was starting to think you didn’t know what to do with that sweet mouth of yours.”

“I know a thing or two,” Tendo answers. Yancy smirks.

“Yeah?” he asks. Tendo considers that dangerously low zipper again. What does a man like Yancy Becket wear under his boiler suit?

Tendo says, “I know that you invited yourself into my room.” He raises himself up on his knees, so that he towers over Yancy. He leans in, a kiss that ends with a nip on the lips. “I know you want me.”

“God yes, Tendo,” says Yancy, his fingers on the top button of Tendo’s shirt--

And Tendo stops him there.

“I want to leave this on,” he says.

“Who doesn’t love a man in uniform?” Yancy asks, nodding in agreement, and Tendo rolls that boiler suit down his shoulders. There are a benefits to being a Jaeger pilot, and one of them is muscle tone beyond your wildest dreams. Yancy looks like he’s about to say something - Tendo looks at him evenly, waits. Yancy clears his throat. “You know, uh,” he says, “Raleigh’ll probably find out about this? We’re not - we’re not very good at keeping secrets in the drift. Is that - is that okay?”

The biggest fight Raleigh and Yancy have ever had, Tendo remembers, was over some girl who Raleigh liked and Yancy took out to get to know better. “Raleigh’s not gonna fight you for my honor of something stupid like that, is he?” Tendo smirks.

If there was ever a moment to say something, he thinks, this would be it. The rebellious part of him, the part that said _fuck everything_ and went prematurely for the kiss, says, _you don’t owe him shit_ \- but _that_ is an attitude that has historically not gone over well for him. “Real talk, though,” says Tendo. “Before this goes any further.”

“Yeah?” asks Yancy. “Shit, don’t tell me you’re _married_.”

“No,” says Tendo, momentarily thrown. Maybe he can still skip this? _No_. Can he be suave? There is literally no way to be suave about this, he thinks, and takes that as a challenge. _Motherfucker, I will make this suave_. “Yancy, I think you’re operating on the assumption that I’ve got the same junk as you, and I don’t.”

Shit, he thinks, that was not suave.

Yancy takes a moment to stare at Tendo’s crotch. Tendo waits it out. Yancy meets his eye again. “Yeah,” he says, “I’m fine with that.”

There is a long-ish silence that follows, in which Tendo is not sure that Yancy is actually _fine with that_ , or else that he’s somehow otherwise ruined the moment. Then, Yancy reaches over, picks up the Maker’s Mark, and takes another swig. Tendo eyes the bottle, trying to remember how much there was in it when Yancy got here. “You’re gonna make yourself sick, come on,” he says.

“You’re no fun,” Yancy objects, but he sets the bottle aside again.

“I’m a lot of fun.” Tendo leans in - the smell of alcohol is strong and hot on Yancy’s breath. It makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Let me show you how much fun I can be.”

What happens next happens _fast_ , a shifting of his weight that Tendo is sure, in retrospect, that Yancy has practiced a dozen times with a dozen partners. It puts him on his back, Yancy’s thumbs pressing against his hipbones, and his breath catches in his throat. Yancy smiles - white teeth - and he undoes Tendo’s belt and untucks his shirt.

“You’d uh, you’d stop me if I was fucking this up, right?” Yancy asks, cringing, and Tendo would be lying if he said it weren’t a kind of cute look on him. He sits up, puts a hand to Yancy’s jaw, and kisses him.

“Don’t tell me I’ve got you all flustered,” he says.

“Is it too late to say I don’t want to ruin our friendship?” asks Yancy.

“I’m not thinking of it as ruining,” Tendo replies. “More of an upgrade.”  Which seems to do the trick, because it gets Yancy’s hands under his waistband and gets his boxers off. Yancy takes a moment to assess the situation, and then he puts one hand on Tendo’s hipbone, and one on his opposite knee, and he kisses a line from the crease where his calf meets his thigh and then up-

Tendo puts his hands in Yancy’s hair. “Oh,” he murmurs.

“So you like that?”

“Less talk, more tongue,” says Tendo, and Yancy leans back down and puts one of Tendo’s legs neatly over his shoulder.  He has stubble, Tendo notices when it rasps against his thigh, and his breath is as hot against him as it was on his neck just a moment ago, and his mouth is warm, and his tongue is firm and-

Tendo’s hands tighten in Yancy’s hair. Yancy presses closer, his tongue sliding _down_ and _in_ and-

“Not- not there,” Tendo says, fighting to get the words out of his throat. _Too breathy_ , he thinks. _Get ahold of yourself._ Yancy stops and looks up at him expectantly.

“No?” he asks.

Tendo swallows. His throat feels dry. “Everywhere else is fine,” he says. “Just not - not inside.”

“Right,” says Yancy, and starts to lower his head again, but then he says, “You’re really tense?”

“Sorry,” says Tendo.

“You were really suave there for a bit,” says Yancy, and Tendo flops onto his back and presses his hands over his face.

“I tried,” he says. Yancy laughs.

“Just relax,” he says, and Tendo nods, and lowers his hands back into Yancy’s hair, and feels his breath again, hot between his legs.  

14.

Raleigh gives him an approving little nod after the Beckets’ next simulator bout. They never discuss it beyond that.

15.

“This job is going to kill me,” says Yancy when he gets back from Los Angeles. They called the Kaiju Yamarashi, and it was the biggest one yet, green and crocodilian and horrible. Bigger than Trespasser, even, if such a thing is possible - Tendo knows, intellectually, that things have come through the breach since K-Day that make Trespasser look like a doormouse, but the beast in his memory is larger than in life.

“I looked it in the eye,” says Yancy, sliding into Tendo’s bed. “It was…” He trails off, at a loss for words, or something. Tendo clenches and unclenches his hands at his sides: it doesn’t sit right with him that the Beckets had their first deployment and he wasn’t the LOCCENT officer to call it, that _Danger_ made her first kill crouched over Long Beach, hands wrapped tight around a cargo crane, and not in the icy waters off Kenai.

Yancy rolls over and props himself up on his elbow. “I- I’m not saying that we’ve got to end this, but - you should have people other than Raleigh and I, because we’re going to die one day.”

Tendo is quiet, and Yancy leans down to kiss him along his cheekbones like he’s committing the planes of his face to memory, and it’s depressing, but Tendo will allow him this.

“I love you,” Yancy says, almost too quiet to hear, “but that’s not enough to save me from this.”

16.

In his dreams, San Francisco is still burning.

17.

Alison Tegoseak is a munitions officer. She has a rubber-headed mallet that she hangs from a loop on her uniform coveralls and long, dark hair that she pulls into a ponytail with a bit of a retro pouf that makes Tendo’s heart flutter every time he sees her in the mess hall.

“Just ask her out,” says Yancy.

“She has a boyfriend,” says Tendo.

“So do you. Ask her out. You date none of the girls you don’t talk to.”

Alison Tegoseak has a laugh like a gull. She laughs when she hears that Raleigh and Yancy Becket call themselves Anchorage locals - her family came down from the North Slope when her great-grandfather was a little boy. “ _I’m_ local,” says Alison Tegoseak. “Their mother was from _France_.”

Tendo stands awkwardly in her workshop, an intruder on foreign territory. “Anyway,” says Alison, “You want to go on a date? With me? That is the weirdest shit I’ve heard all day, Choi, and one of the mechanics dropped acid for the first time last night. Last time I checked, it was some kind of open secret that you and Becket Number One were a _thing_.”

“It’s not exclusive,” says Tendo. “He pretty much begged me to see other people.”

There’s her gull laugh. “Well, as long as I’m not picking up his sloppy seconds,” she says. “I’ve got a thing, too, you know? But it’s _not exclusive_ , either, like how you put it - although _he_ might not see it that way. But okay, okay. How about - Friday night? We can go see a movie?”

He has a spring in his step all the way back to LOCCENT. The shit Raleigh and Yancy give him is worth it.

18.

Almost.

19.

He watches his lover die in brilliant technicolor, synapses firing across a holographic display into oblivion.

20.

San Francisco is still burning, and he tastes himself in Yancy’s mouth.

21.

He watches his lover die in brilliant technicolor, synapses firing across a holographic display into oblivion, and on the other side of the screen, Raleigh lights up like a Christmas tree, both sides of his mind flashing bright as the break of dawn.

Tendo is chief LOCCENT officer. He wears the uniform, he wears the pins. There will-

It is a hard thought to get through.

He decides not to get through it.

He is chief LOCCENT officer, and as long as there is a pilot alive and a jaeger standing, then he will call this deployment to its close.

22.

He spends a long time in LOCCENT after everyone else has cleared out, listening to the computers whir through their sleep cycles, watching the power-save lights glitter in the projector alcoves. After a long time - how long? Tendo doesn’t know - Stacker Pentecost comes in and sits down at one of the empty consoles.

“Raleigh’s stable,” says Pentecost, and Tendo nods.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he says around the knot in his throat, and he hears the marshall draw a deep breath.

“We’re probably not going to find a body,” says Pentecost, and it’s nothing Tendo wasn’t prepared for or expecting. “I know you were-”

Tendo cuts him off. “Don’t say _close_ ,” he says. “Don’t reduce it that way.”

Pentecost nods. “My condolences,” he says, getting up. “We lost a great ranger out there today. A great man.”

Tendo nods as well, stares into the middle distance at the twinkling lights and says, “Thank you, sir.”

23.

There’s not a funeral.

There’s a memorial service in the little Anchorage church where all three Becket siblings were baptized but it feels open-ended and inconclusive. Pentecost reads a psalm. Everyone wears their dress uniforms, and it’s too perfect and too neat and too clean. Tendo stands beside Raleigh, who seems unstable on his crutches.

“I felt him die,” Raleigh says quietly as they watch mourners file out of the sanctuary. “He was in my head and then-” He starts to gesture, but wobbles precariously and stops. “He was _gone_ , Tendo. He was ripped out of my head.”

“I was watching,” says Tendo. “I saw-”

He stops. Too raw. Raleigh nods.

“I’m leaving the force,” he says. “I can’t do this. Not without Yance.”

24.

Alison gives him two months, and then she finds him in the mess and says, “If you’re still interested, Choi, you have my number.”

Tendo goes and finds her in her workshop the next day. “I’m a mess,” he says. “And I can’t ask you to carry this grief for me.”

Alison puts down her mallet. “I wasn’t offering to,” she says. “And to be honest, I can’t. I hardly knew him. But you can’t stop your life from moving forward just because he’s not in it any longer.”

She pauses.

“Sorry if that was too frank,” she says. “I’m told I’m kind of a hardass.”

“No, you’re fine,” says Tendo.

She is two inches taller than him, and she kisses him like he might break, and straightens his collar and fixes the little insignia pin on his lapel. “Still breathing, Choi?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Tendo says.

25.

San Francisco never stops burning.

26.

But he grows accustomed to all the things he has lost.

27.

Mako Mori sits down beside him in LOCCENT, a thick bundle of papers on her clipboard. “What were _Danger_ ’s original pilots like?” she asks. Tendo looks her way.

“The Becket Boys?” he asks. “Best friends I’ve ever had.”

“I know Yancy died,” says Mako. “But what about the younger brother - Raleigh? I’ve read the reports from Coyote Tango… it’s always optimal to have original pilots. Even with a different copilot-”

“Could we get him back here?” Tendo finishes.

Mako shrugs. “You would know better than me, Commander Choi,” she says carefully. Tendo thinks: it’s _Danger_ they’re talking about.

“If anything could bring Raleigh Becket back,” he says, “it’d be seeing that Jaeger standing tall again. He’d never let a ranger pair he wasn’t part of drive her.” Mako nods, taking it all in - Pentecost’s ward has turned into one of the most capable engineers east of Honolulu, thinks Tendo, and it almost feels like she did it overnight. He remembers when she was small and chasing after the Hansen boy… but the Hansen boy’s a ranger now.   

“She is a beautiful machine,” says Mako.

“That she is,” Tendo agrees.

28.

Stacker Pentecost always wears his formal uniform. Hercules Hansen wears his for the last day in the Ice Box and it’s the first time Tendo’s seen him in it since Yancy’s memorial and that hits him almost as hard as the sight of all their equipment crated up and ready to go.

“I hope you’ll join us in Hong Kong,” says Pentecost.

Tendo goes home, and Alison says, “The way I see it, it all comes down to do you trust Pentecost enough to put yourself at ground zero for the end of the world?”

Tendo unclips his insignias and leaves them on the coffee table. “I was there when this started,” he says. “And besides, I don’t trust anyone else to call _Danger_ through a fight.”

Alison smiles. “Looks like you’re going to China,” she says. “If you die there, I will kill you.”

29.

Officially, there are no uniforms in Hong Kong. The J-Tech crews wear their old jumpsuits like gang colors. It is anarchic: too bright, too loud, electricity crackling underneath like rolling thunder.

At the center of it all stands Stacker Pentecost, the eye of the storm in navy wool and dress shoes, not uniform, but-

Tendo follows his lead, puts on slacks and a button-up and suspenders and a bow-tie, because the day he does not dress for his job will be the day he dies. If this ends here, this ends here, but no one will ever be able to say he did not serve with everything he had.

30.

 _Endure this_ , his grandfather says, and the mushroom cloud blossoms higher and higher.

31.

Tendo adjusts the rosary on his wrist.

Movement in the breach.

 


End file.
